At a WordCamp there is inevitably Lecture Regret – that is when you have to make a hard choice between 2 or 3 equally interesting and relevant talks. Jeremy Clarke’s Put a Map on it! appeared to be a lost opportunity. But Jeremy put his slides up on Slideshare.net promptly so some really useful tips on Geo Mapping resulted. First, Jeremy’s slides on the Geo Mashup plugin solved a problem a client was having – how to show on a map where submitted photos and stories were coming from. It is also nice that Geo Mashup supports not just Google but also Open Street Map and Leaflet. Even better, Jeremy highlight both the shortcodes and the corresponding PHP scripts offered by GEOMashup.
Next Jeremy pointed out a great tip on making responsive Google Maps as seen below:
But this was not all. Jeremy provided a link to a tip on how to make Google Maps fully responsive. I was able to use this right away.
Finally, there was a link to some additional Google Map plugins for WordPress. This uncovered the WP Google Maps plugin as seen in action below:
This plugin is typical of what is currently appearing in the WordPress directory as free plugins. It is just serviceable for adding a Google map. One needs to get the Pro version for $19.99US [for two websites, $59.99US for unlimited websites plus some added plugins] to get useful work done. But the interface for high end mapping is quite good. However, just using Google’s embed code one can easily match the free WP Google Maps capabilities. Consider using either Geo Mashup or WP Google Maps plugins when you need to show many locations with popup information on one or more maps.
Summary
Because Jeremy promptly loaded up his presentation on Slideshare, one could read through and find a whole set of gems and good ideas on how to use Geo Data in WordPress. Right now Jeremy has shown there are plenty of tools for doing simple to advanced mapping in WordPress.